Edition 01 · HR Edition — Completed 17 July 2026 · Co-hosted with HRMAU · Protea Hotel Kampala Skyz

The Digital Leadership Roundtable opened its series where change is often felt first: in how organisations lead their people.

Co-hosted with the Human Resource Managers' Association of Uganda (HRMAU), the HR Edition brought together HR leaders and culture practitioners for a candid conversation on what it takes to align people strategy with business growth in a digital economy — asking the same question the whole platform was built on: how should this part of the business lead through change?

Founder's Welcome Remarks

Primera Muthoni, Founder and Team Lead of Analytics Business Centre (ABC), opened the morning by thanking HRMAU for partnering to make the roundtable possible — framing it not as an ABC event that HR happened to attend, but as an HR conversation ABC had the privilege to help build a room for.

She traced her own path into this work back to her years in product management: first at MTN Uganda, where she worked across more than forty products including MTN Pulse and the MyMTN App, and later at Yellow Card Financial across sixteen African markets. Those years taught her, she said, that technology only works when people actually use it. She had watched brilliant systems get built, launched with fanfare, and then quietly ignored by the very people they were designed for — not because the technology was bad, but because nobody had done the harder work, the human work, of bringing people along with it.

That gap was why she built ABC. Today an authorised Zoho Partner based in Kampala, ABC works with businesses across Uganda on everything from CRM systems and finance automation to HR and payroll platforms, business intelligence, and digital transformation more broadly. But as she put it, the team rarely describes its work as "implementing software." More often, they describe it as helping organisations change how they work — and helping their people come with them.

She reflected on a pattern she had seen across dozens of Ugandan businesses: almost every organisation trying to digitise something — whether a CRM, a payroll system, or an inventory tool — treats it as a technology project first, and only remembers the people question, the culture question, once adoption stalls and the system starts collecting dust. Culture, she argued, is not the soft layer sitting on top of a technology strategy. It is the foundation that strategy either stands on, or collapses without.

That was precisely why the edition's theme, Aligning HR, Culture & Technology for Business Growth, was chosen: not for its marketing appeal, but because it names the exact intersection where she has watched businesses succeed spectacularly, and others spend real money on systems that never earned their keep. HR, she noted, sits at the centre of that intersection whether it asked to be there or not — tasked with people, and increasingly tasked with proving that technology investment actually changes behaviour, not just paperwork.

She closed by telling the room she did not want anyone leaving with a new piece of software to buy, but with a sharper question to carry back to their desks on Monday: not "what tool should we implement," but "what does our culture need to be true before any tool will actually work?"

Keynote Address

Paul Rumanda Rugambwa, CHRO, COO, and President of HRMAU, followed with a keynote that reframed the anxiety many feel around AI and technology in the workplace.

Technology, he argued, has never been the hard part of transformation. The hard part has always been people: whether they feel safe enough to learn, trusted enough to try, and led well enough to believe change is happening with them rather than to them.

He pointed to World Economic Forum research ranking the skills gap above capital or regulation as the leading barrier to transformation — framing it as a hopeful signal rather than a discouraging one: a constraint leaders can address together. With Uganda's development plans and budgets already in motion, he noted that what remained was the human work — preparing people, building trust, and building organisations where every Ugandan could grow into their full contribution.

He closed with a challenge to the room: to CEOs, who set culture through what they reward, and to HR leaders, whom he urged to lead this moment "with courage and with data."

The Panel

The edition's panel brought together Peter Kabaseke, Joyce Nakalema, and Dr Irene Mutuzo, each offering a distinct vantage point on culture, technology, and leadership in the modern workplace.

Beyond the Room

Every detail of the edition was designed to extend the conversation beyond the room: a mobilisation campaign built the audience ahead of time, a branded LinkedIn presence carried the discussion online, and a specially designed giveaway notebook gave every attendee something to carry the ideas forward with.

The series continues. The HR Edition was the first chapter of a series that goes on to explore Marketing, Finance, Operations, and more — because leadership and technology don't reshape only one part of a business. They reshape all of them.